haircut

I sit on a special stool with a low, curved back.
Grandfather fastens a towel around my neck with a silver-toothed
clip. He combs my bangs down smooth, straight.

I can see the Teutonic pores in the dark skin of his face.
He smells like the fir trees in the backyard, leaning next
to the pigeon house. I show him a page from a magazine.

His shiny scissors open and close against the hard ridge
of my brow. They fly around my face in practiced snips.
Grandmother brings him a saucer of coffee from the kitchen,

blue and white and delft. They watch over us for the night,
their only grandchildren. My younger sisters follow grandmother around,
mesmerized by the glass bauble percolating on the stove.

We sleep in the coldest room. I climb to the topmost bunk,
bed-wood planed smooth by grandfather. Grandmother tucks us in
with her tuberous knuckles, fussing and calling us honey.

I smile with my lost tooth, tousling my new hair.
Grandmother brings us glasses of milk and windmill cookies. My sisters
pinch me through the half-railing, painted a high gloss like taffy.

I turn and twitch and itch, imagining fur and forest,
startled birds. I slip through the railing and land
on a ragrug of knotted wool fast and far asleep.

Grandfather hears the thump and bears me
with his faun arms to a lower bunk where I curl up with a sister
already warm. He whispers sleep good to me in German.

Clippings rain down all the next day
at his barbershop. Grandfather tells a tale of how I fell
from the sky and never woke up, so deep was my dreaming.

© Tori Grant Welhouse